The present invention relates generally to the field of audio and/or video (hereinafter “AV”) data stream capture and processing. More particularly, the present invention relates to the identification and handling of AV stream components by reference to, or in conjunction with, ancillary data from one or more further data streams linked to the AV data stream, especially social media streams.
Recent years have seen a huge growth in the area of web-based and mobile technologies referred to generally as social media by which users can form online or networked groups for the exchange of comments and creation and sharing of media comment such as AV clips. Well-known examples include Facebook, flickr, YouTube and Twitter.
A more recent development is Social TV which has attempted to integrate television broadcasts with social media feeds to provide greater interactivity through enabling viewers to post comments as the broadcast happens: an example of this from the UK is the political debate program “Question Time” which hosts a live Twitter feed as the broadcast is aired to allow viewers to join the debate.
As part of the shared experience, users may wish to identify (tag) individual segments of a broadcast as being of potential interest to others, with a resulting stream of tagged portions creating a user-defined highlights package of the broadcast In one known method to enable such tagging, in response to a user request to mark a portion of media content, a tag is inserted in the stream which tag may subsequently be used to access the tagged portion of content.
A problem arises when it is desired not only to capture AV segments, but also the related social media data (comments, links to related content and so forth). Devices such as a personal video recorder (PVR) are commonly used to record TV programs. This allows a user to watch a football match, for instance, at a later time and skip through adverts. This is not very sociable in the sense that the user misses out on discussions/highlights that are posted on the social media at the time when the event is broadcasting live. The user could surf related websites and watch highlights/discussions before or after watching the recorded match. However this is time consuming and the user may end up watching parts of the match many times. Sometimes it also spoils the fun, if the user wanted to avoid but then accidentally saw the results. There is no currently satisfactory mechanism to embed the comments/highlights into a recorded program.
A problem involves how to correctly associate the comments in the social media stream with the moment in the recording that they are associated with. This problem arises because people watching a program ‘live’ are not all necessarily watching the program at the same time. Viewers experience different levels of lag depending on whether they are watching the program through normal terrestrial TV, a satellite broadcast, or an internet streaming service (for example the BBC's iPlayer service). Comments may also arrive significantly after a given event, depending on the user's behavior.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a method and supporting system to improve the integration of AV streams with data from associated streams, such as social media feeds.